“That woman,” the com-tech, Tang Ya, said between sips of Terran coffee in the mess cabin where Dane had gone on his first excursion out of sick bay, “she was alien. I’ve been wondering—” From the inner pocket of his tunic, he pulled a sketch block. In sharp, set lines on it a figure was boldly presented. He put it before Dane. “Look like her?”
Dane was startled. As with all the crew, Tang Ya had his hobby to relieve the tedium of long voyages. But to Dane’s knowledge, it was the creation of miniature electronic devices, toys. He had not known the Martian com-tech was also an artist, or enough of one to produce the picture he now saw.
He studied it critically, not for the skill of the work but for likeness to face and figure of his memory.
“The face—it was narrower at the chin; the eyes—they seemed to slant more, unless the mask made them just seem so.”
Ya took up the block, pressed a small indentation on its rim, and the lines Dane thought set altered into the shape he had suggested.
“Yes!” But he was still amazed at the alteration.
The com-tech again laid the block on the table, sliding it along to Captain Jellico, who studied it for a long moment before he in turn passed it to Tau, and from the medic it went to Steen Wilcox. The astrogator picked it up and held it closer to the light.
“Sitllith—”
The word meant nothing to Dane but apparently did to the Captain, for he almost snatched the plaque back from his second-in-command to give it a second intent examination.
“You’re sure?”
“Sitllith!” Wilcox was certain. “But it doesn’t fit.”
“No,” Jellico agreed angrily.
“Just what is Sitllith—or who?” Tau asked.
“What and who both,” replied Wilcox. “Alien-humanoid, but really alien to the tenth—”
Dane started, leaning forward to view the picture where it lay before the captain. Alien to the tenth! Xenobiology was a required study for cargo masters, as it was on them that first contact for trade with alien races often rested. Their study of alien customs, desires, and personality factors never ended, but he had never believed that so humanoid a form could contain so alien a personality as Wilcox had stated. It was rather like saying that a Terran snake’s identity went about clad in flesh and bones such as his own.
“But she—she talked rationally. She—she was very humanoid—” he protested.
“She also poisoned you,” the astrogator replied dryly. “Not with any concoction smeared on her nail either. That was from a gland in her finger! As to how she could appear so close to the human norm, I don’t know that. Conditioning might have something to do with it. But a Sitllith on Xecho! They are thought to be planet-bound, to have so great a fear of the open that any attempt to rise from the surface of their world brings about self-death—they frighten themselves to death. Their world is infrared light, so we don’t visit them much. I saw just one, in deep freeze back at a lab on Barbarrossa. And it was immature. Its poison sack was empty. It had gone after a Survey scout and stowed away in his ship when he lifted. When it found it was in space”—Wilcox shrugged—“that was the end. He brought it back in deep freeze. But you had an adult, operating off her own world, and I would have sworn that was impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Tau said. He was right, as all spacemen knew. What would be wildly impossible, improbable, not to be believed on one world, might prove commonplace on another planet. Wild nightmares on Terra were upright and worthy citizens (if not by Terran standards) on alien soil. Customs so bizarre as to be unbelievable became ritual by law elsewhere. So, long ago spacemen, and even more Free Traders, who hunted the lesser known and newly opened planets, had come to believe anything, no matter how incredible it might seem to the planet-bound.
Jellico picked up the sketch again. “This can be fixed to stay?” he asked the astrogator.
“Press in the middle—then the impression will be locked until you wish to release it.”
“We have a dead man, a mask”—Wilcox set down his empty mug—“an alien supposed to be planet-bound but appearing parsecs from its or her native world, a box that has vanished, and a cargo master back from the dead—and no solution so far. Unless we can find a hint or two before we planet—”
“We have something else.” Frank Mura stood in the doorway. Though he spoke in his usual quiet tone, there was something in his voice that drew their attention. “We have two missing brachs.”
“What in the—!” Jellico was on his feet. Because his main interest was that of a xenobiologist, he had spent time observing the animals from Xecho, even taking them to his cabin on occasion for freedom from their cage. Since Queex, the hideous hoobat whose cage hung there, objected so strenuously to their coming that Jellico’s usual method of quieting the parrot-crab-toad, that of a smart blow on the floor of its cage to jar it into silence had not sufficed, he had had to transfer Queex elsewhere for the duration of the brachs’ visit.
“But the cage lock,” he added to his first protest.
Mura extended a hand. Between his fingers was a thin wire, twisted at one end. “This was in that,” he stated.
“By the Seven Names of Trutex!” Ali took the bit of wire and held it up, twirling it between thumb and finger. “A pick-lock!”
“It was pulled,” Mura continued, “from the netting—inside the cage.”
He certainly had all their attention now. Twisted from inside the cage? But that must mean—Dane’s earlier complacent acceptance of the impossible when it dealt with Sitlliths balked at accepting this particular revelation. Inside the cage meant that the brachs had twisted it free. But the brachs were animals, and not particularly bright animals at that. If he remembered rightly, and he should, for that rating was part of the invoices, they did not rank as high on the learning scale as Sinbad, who was now sitting in the far corner of the mess cabin industriously washing his face.
“Let me see that!” Jellico took the wire and studied it with the same concentration he had given to the picture “Broken off—and, yes, it is a pick-lock.”
“The brachs,” Mura repeated, “are missing.”
They could not be in the holds, Dane thought. Those were sealed. That left the engine room, the sick bay, their personal cabins, the control section, and a few other places, none of which could afford much protection for two escaped animals, while the intense search earlier for the box had certainly acquainted the crew with every possible space.
Now they had another hunt. Two animals, perhaps frightened, and with the female pregnant, so that she should not be alarmed, must be handled with more caution. Jellico set up a search party consisting only of those who had had contact with the brachs, since strangers might only send them into some desperate and damaging flight. He called instructions to Stotz in the engine room and ordered the engineer, the two tube men, Kosti and Weeks, together with Ali, who was to return there forthwith, to stay put until their section of the ship was declared empty of brachs.
Wilcox and Ya were to join Shannon on watch duty at the controls, search that section, and seal themselves in and any wandering brach out, leaving the actual search to Dane, Tau, Mura, and the captain, who had petted, fed, and cared for the live cargo. As an added precaution, Sinbad was shut up in the galley.
When the engine room and the control cabin both reported crew in, brachs not present, the other four began. Dane made his way down to the cargo level, but the seals there were intact. There was no way they could have gotten into the holds. The thought of the pick-lock still bothered him. How had the brachs done that? Or had they? Was it only meant to seem that they had freed themselves? But no member of the crew would play such a senseless prank. And the stranger was dead, in a freeze compartment. Dane’s imagination suggested a very macabre explanation, and he found himself turning almost against his will to a side passage, to another compartment door. That, too, was sealed, and he knew with relief that that wild speculation was truly impossible. The dead did not come to life and walk again.